shortcomings, textbooks are hard-pressed to explain the results of the 1920
election. James Cox, the Democratic candidate who was Wilson’s would-be
successor, was crushed by the nonentity Warren G. Harding, who never even
campaigned. In the biggest landslide in the history of American presidential
politics, Harding got almost 64 percent of the major-party votes. The people
were “tired,” textbooks suggest, and just wanted a “return to normalcy.” The
possibility that the electorate knew what it was doing in rejecting Wilson never
occurs to our authors.^31 It occurred to Helen Keller, however. She called
Wilson “the greatest individual disappointment the world has ever known!”
It isn’t only high school history courses that heroify Wilson. Those few
textbooks that do discuss Wilson’s racism and other shortcomings, such as
Land of Promise, have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal
Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public
television documentaries, and historical novels.
For twenty-five years now, Michael Frisch has been conducting an
experiment in social archetypes at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
He asks his first-year college students for “the first ten names that you think of”
in American history before the Civil War. When Frisch found that his students
listed the same political and military figures year after year, replicating the
privileged positions afforded them in high school textbooks, he added the
proviso, “excluding presidents, generals, statesmen, etc.” Frisch still gets a
stable list, but one less predictable on the basis of history textbooks. Most
years, Betsy Ross has led the list. (Paul Revere usually comes in second.)
What is interesting about this choice is that Betsy Ross never did anything.
Frisch notes that she played “no role whatsoever in the actual creation of any
actual first flag.” Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her
descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Philadelphia, largely
invented the myth of the first flag. With justice, high school textbooks
universally ignore Betsy Ross; not one high school textbook lists her in its
index.^32 So how and why does her story get transmitted? Frisch offers a
hilarious explanation: If George Washington is the Father of Our Country, then
Betsy Ross is our Blessed Virgin Mary! Frisch describes the pageants
reenacted (or did we only imagine them?) in our elementary school years:
“Washington [the god] calls on the humble seamstress Betsy Ross in her tiny
home and asks her if she will make the nation’s flag, to his design. And Betsy
promptly brings forth—from her lap!—the nation itself, and the promise of